LAST Sunday was International Women’s Day. I was made aware of this the moment I accessed social media, being bombarded by a seemingly endless torrent of posts telling me how wonderful women are, how they are superior to men, how there would have been no wars had women been in charge, how individual women have bravely broken through one glass ceiling after another over the years, and how they are still being held back by the strictures of the dreaded patriarchy. All the posts in my stream reflected the lives of affluent women living in the developed world; none reflected the lives of women in what was until recently dubbed the ‘Third World’. One posted by the British Army informed me that they now have women serving in every rank, calling it an ‘achievement [that] not only strengthens our capability, but reflects the society we defend’.
Really? How on earth does it strengthen our capability? Please explain, Ministry of Defence. That’s quite a boast for a nation that has more admirals than ships in its navy – the Royal Navy, which once ruled the world’s oceans, ended the slave trade and had about a thousand fighting vessels as recently as 1950. Now we seem incapable of defending Cyprus. Let us hope those admirals reflect the gender balance in the society they seek to defend. The feminisation of the armed forces, along with that of the police and prison service, will only weaken Britain against her external and internal enemies and allow criminals to roam the streets at will.
Also, I don’t need to be constantly reminded, as I was on Sunday and beyond, that Jacqueline du Pré was a great cellist, one of the greatest, in my opinion; I’m reminded of her greatness every time I listen to her recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. My admiration for her artistry has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman.
I absolutely detest International Women’s Day. Actually, I find it excruciating, a sickly lovefest of sycophancy, narcissism and moral exhibitionism. In fact, I place International Women’s Day on a par with Kwanzaa, another highly irritating celebration of another favoured demographic, which impedes upon my Boxing Day celebrations every year. And let us not forget Zero Discrimination Day and World Seagrass Day and other inane Maoist-sounding global ‘awareness days’, sponsored – yes, you guessed it – by the United Nations or affiliated institutions.
Of course, I would never say any of this out loud to anyone, apart from a few exasperated old reactionary duffers of my acquaintance and age, and, oddly when you think of it, my beloved wife, who, I feel sure, shares my negative attitude towards a celebration of women inspired by a German Marxist theorist and Communist agitator. A lifelong coward, I would never articulate my disdain for International Women’s Day to anyone for fear of being accused of misogyny, that coverall word use against men who say anything critical of a woman even when she has earned the criticism. Apparently, not liking Jane Austen sufficiently is now considered misogynistic.
For what it’s worth, I adore Austen and consider Emma to be one of the greatest novels in the English language, and John Knightley, with the possible exception of John Harmon in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, to be the most Platonic ideal of what it is to be a masculine man of restraint and decency to be found anywhere in English literature. Indeed, I admire Austen so much that I am deeply offended by all the feminist girl-boss drivel out there attempting to make her more relevant to people living in the 21st century, which is now approaching cottage-industry levels. But what the hell do I, a Catholic secondary-modern-educated chap who earned a 4 in his GCSE metalwork exam, know about the finer points of English literature? I’m just an insignificant member of that increasingly despised demographic: ‘pale, male, and stale’, and no spring chicken to boot.
But, ladies, don’t think you receive a get-out-of-jail-free card due to your sex, or gender, or whatever they’re calling it these days. Think again. Have you heard of that nasty hard-to-diagnose malady called ‘internalised misogyny’, for which there is no known cure and which, at least according to feminist author Caroline Criado-Perez, is rampant in society as a whole?
At this point, dear reader, you’ve probably figured out that my feminist credentials leave a lot to be desired. You would, of course, be right. Indeed, I consider feminism to be a very harmful, nay dangerous, ideology for the women it is ostensibly intended to protect and emancipate, and detrimental for civilised life in general.
The older I get the more convinced I am that feminism’s ultimate goal, at least in its Marxist-tinged form that emerged in the 1960s, is the destruction of the nuclear family, stated boldly by Robin Morgan, radical feminist, poet, former child actress and onetime contributing editor to Ms. magazine, when she argued that ‘we can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage’, adding that she saw the nuclear family as a vehicle for subjugation. It’s helpful when they say the quiet bit out loud, is it not?
Still, when it comes to feminism, my attitude tends to be geographically predicated. For example, when I consider those women treated as chattels in fundamentalist Muslim theocracies or poorly paid female garment workers slaving for long hours in fetid sweatshops in Bangladesh, with few, if any, benefits, then, all of a sudden, the hidden feminist stirs indignantly within me. Which it also does when I remember the horrors endured by those Yazidi women at the hands of Isis a few years back. Not to mention the slaughter of thousands of Iranian women in Iran very recently. That’s enough to make me go full Germaine Greer, although it’s interesting that those Western feminists now protesting against Trump killing Iranians were virtually silent when their sisters were being butchered on the streets of Tehran.
However, my budding feminism quickly evaporates when I leave the developing world and head in a westerly direction and consider all those upper-middle-class, college- and prep-school educated, mostly white women moaning about the glass ceiling and everyday sexism and misogyny, and how highly paid BBC anchorwomen supposedly receive smaller salaries than their male counterparts. Common decency and Christian ethics aside, I struggle to feel sympathy for such women, who are some of the most privileged and pampered individuals in human history, of either sex.
Before I conclude what is beginning to sound like a misogynist and probably sexist rant, I feel obligated to say that I love women more that I can say, one in particular, and believe wholeheartedly that women are equal in dignity to men in the eyes of God. Some of the most cherished friendships in my life have been with women, and I’m not talking about romantic relationships, but ones that are intellectually enriching. I also believe that men and women, while different in many respects – as a retired teacher of boys and girls, I can say this with absolute confidence – complement each other wonderfully well, a complementarity that has served civilisation quite well over the centuries.
International Women’s Day might have been a noble enterprise when it started in the years leading up to the First World War, at a time when most women couldn’t vote or attend universities, but it has now become an excuse to denigrate men further than they are already being denigrated, to poison relations between the sexes, and to make extraordinarily extravagant claims about the natural superiority of women. It is a yearly extravaganza rooted in what I call ‘junk feminism’, misandry, and the most narcissistic forms of virtue signalling.
